AMD and Canonical Claim OpenStack Performance Record

Need 168,000 virtual machines provisioned quickly? There's an app for that. Well, a finely-tuned collaboration anyway, with AMD's SeaMicro SM15000 and Canonical's Ubuntu OpenStack. AMD announced that its SeaMicro SM15000 server set an industry benchmark record for hyperscale cloud computing with a demonstration that highlights how OpenStack can quickly and reliably provision on-demand computing services at scale.

OpenStack -- the popular open source cloud infrastructure software -- is one of the hottest new workloads, and hardware vendors are racing to make sure service providers and enterprises deploy it using their products.

The test provisioned 168,000 virtual machines on 576 physical hosts. The first 75,000 virtual machines were deployed in 6.5 hours, AMD said. The bare metal servers, storage and networking were provisioned using MaaS (Metal as a Service), part of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Canonical's Ubuntu OpenStack.

"This record validates that the SeaMicro SM15000 is well suited for massive OpenStack deployments," said Dhiraj Mallick, corporate vice president and general manager at AMD's Data Center Server Solutions division. "The combination of Ubuntu OpenStack and the SeaMicro SM15000 server provides the industry's leading solution to build cloud infrastructure that is highly responsive and ideal for on-demand services."

One Chassis to Deploy Them All

The SeaMicro server has always been about web-scale, dense, massive capacity solutions with innovative architectural features such as its Freedom Fabric. In 10-rack units, a SM15000 server links 512 compute cores, 160 gigabits of I/O networking and more than five petabytes of storage with a 1.28 terabyte freedom fabric. It supports next-generation AMD Opteron processors, Intel Xeon E3-1260L and E3-12565Lv2 and E3-1265Lv3 (Haswell) and Intel Atom N570 processors.

The SM15000 recently received a 2014 Silver award from the Edison Awards in the Applied Technology, Research and Business Optimization category. Last year the company introduced the SeaMicro OpenStack blueprint, empowering OpenStack compute, storage and networking layers to take full advantage of the scalable SM15000 server.

Canonical OpenStack 14.04 provides SeaMicro SM15000 integration with support for the system's RESTful API. The optimized Ubuntu OpenStack distribution with tools for provisioning, building and managing leverages the SM15000 scale, fabric and speed to present a hyperscale cloud in a box.

Processor vendor AMD bought microserver maker SeaMicro in 2012 for about $330 million. The company said the acquisition was about SeaMicro's Freedom Fabric technology more than anything else. It has continued selling microserver systems using the SeaMicro brand, however.